ANST - Learning Arts and Documentation

[Gunnora Hallakarva]

Since we've been talking about both new artisans and band-weaving, I thought I'd tell a bit of my history.

Back in the days when rocks were still soft, I decided that I wanted to learn to inkle-weave.  No one was card weaving anywhere, and inkle-weaving was the height of weaving technology in the SCA.  So I found a Laurel, Countess Kemreth (Ansteorra's third queen), and pestered
her unmercifully until she agreed to teach me.  She didn't push me to learn -- she wouldn't teach me one iota if I didn't come to her and ask.  But I wanted to learn, so I asked.

Later, I wanted to learn more about the Vikings, having a hybrid Finnish/Viking persona.  So Kemreth set me the task of doing a research project on anything in the Viking World.  I couldn't think of anything, so she assigned me "Viking Swords".  In the process of doing the
research for that paper, I learned lots of unusal things I would never have known about the Vikings had I not done that paper.

Later I did another paper, and another.  Then I became Chronicler, and I needed articles to fill out the newsletter, so I kept writing articles on the Vikings for that.  And today, I know more weird things about the Vikings than I would ever have imagined possible.  And the
research still excites me, every bit as much as doing those first inkle-belts did.

The moral to this story is that the more you learn, the more surpised you can be at what you are learning, and the more you want to learn.  That's ultimately one of the best reasons for doing documentation for any art form -- because you learn new, interesting, fun things.

::GUNNORA::

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